The CIA formally acknowledged that Gehlen had at the end of the war turned over what remained of his intelligence collection efforts against the Soviet Union and started spying for the United States.

CIA declassifying records on Nazi spies

WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- The CIA is finally getting around to declassifying the records of its dealings with former Nazi spies after World War II. It says it has found 251 boxes and 2,901 file folders of potentially relevant documents -- apparently more than 250,000 pages -- and that it will take about two years to complete work on them, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

Carl Oglesby, a political writer and researcher, has been seeking the records since 1985 in connection with a study of Reinhard Gehlen, a German general who had been head of Nazi intelligence for the eastern front.

After the war, at the request of U.S. occupation forces in Europe, he set up "the Gehlen organization," a counterespionage network that supplied the Pentagon and the CIA with the bulk of their intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The organization, which employed thousands of people, many of them former Nazis, was the forerunner of West Germany's secret service, the BND. It was formally recognized in 1956 and Gehlen headed it until he retired in 1968.

When Oglesby got only a smattering of documents from the Army and the CIA, he sued in 1987, emphasizing meetings that Gehlen held in the summer of 1945 with U.S. officials at Fort Hunt, Va. He and some other researchers believe that the post-war hunt for Nazi war criminals was severely compromised by American intelligence demands for help in meeting the new Soviet menace.

Oglesby's lawsuit sputtered for 13 years with the CIA refusing to confirm or deny that it had any records reflecting a relationship with Gehlen. The litigation survived two trips to the U.S. Court of Appeals here, but last August, Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson issued an order indicating she was about to dismiss it at the government's request. She rejected the idea that the CIA or any other agency had "unreasonably delayed" the case.

Weeks later, the CIA formally acknowledged that Gehlen had at the end of the war turned over what remained of his intelligence collection efforts against the Soviet Union and started spying for the United States; the Army "supervised" his work until 1949, when the CIA stepped in for a seven-year stint.

The CIA told the court it was compelled to speak up in response to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which Congress passed in 1998 to require public release of U.S. records related to war criminals and crimes committed by the Nazi government and its allies between March 1933, when Hitler acquired dictatorial powers, and May 1945, when the war in Europe ended.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International